The thirteenth of November 1804 marked a turning point at the Corps of Discovery’s winter quarters: the Missouri River began to run with ice. Three narrators — Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and William Clark — set down accounts of the day, but their entries diverge sharply in subject, scope, and register. Read together, they illustrate how each journal-keeper understood his task differently, and how the official record at Fort Mandan was layered rather than singular.
A Day That Three Men Did Not Share
Most striking is how little overlap exists among the three entries. Gass writes as though the boat were still under sail, describing a moving expedition:
set sail early; the morning was cloudy, with some rain and wind ahead; passed a creek and a long range of bluffs on the south side.
This is anomalous. Clark and Ordway both place the day firmly at Fort Mandan, with the keelboat being unloaded into a storehouse and ice running in the river. Gass’s published Journal (heavily edited by David McKeehan after the expedition) appears here to be either misdated or carrying forward a generic river-travel formula rather than reporting the day’s actual events. The discrepancy is a useful caution: Gass’s printed text is at one remove from his manuscript and cannot always be relied upon as a same-day witness.
Ordway, by contrast, is the day’s most vivid chronicler. While Clark notes only that “Capt. L. at the village,” Ordway tells the full story of Lewis’s pirogue trip upriver to fetch chimney stone:
Cap*. Lewis & 6 men went in the pearogue up the River through the Ice to the first village of the Mandens after Stone for the backs of our Chim-neys… they got fast on a Sand bar & had to be out in the water ab* 2 hours, the Ice running against their legs, their close frooze on them, one of them got 1 of his feet frost bit. it hapned that they had Some whiskey with them to revive their Spirits.
This is the kind of physical, embodied detail Ordway specializes in throughout the winter — frozen clothing, a frostbitten foot, the practical mercy of whiskey. Clark, the commanding officer’s deputy, mentions none of it.
Clark’s Two Drafts and the Ethnographic Eye
Clark wrote the day twice, and the comparison between his rough and fair entries is instructive. Both versions concentrate not on Lewis’s near-disaster but on the diplomatic visit from the Grand Chief of the Mandans, and Che chark Lagru a Chief of the Assinniboins & 7 men of that Nation.
Clark records the gifts exchanged — “a Cord & a Carrot of Tobacco” in the rough draft, refined in the fair copy to “a twist of Tobacco to Smoke with his people & a Gold Cord with a view to Know him again.”
The fair copy expands the ethnographic notes substantially. Clark estimates the Assiniboine population (“about 600 men” in the fair copy versus “about [moo] men in the 3 bands” in the rough), describes their seasonal pattern (hunt in the Plains & winter and trade on the Ossiniboin River
), and identifies them linguistically as Decendants of the Siaux and Speake their language.
He also flags a topic for later treatment: the method of this Kind of Trafick by addoption Shall be explained hereafter.
This is Clark the intelligence-gatherer, fulfilling Jefferson’s instructions to document the Native nations and their trade networks with the British posts on the Assiniboine River.
Register and Priorities
The three entries together show a clear division of labor — not formally assigned, but emergent from each man’s temperament and station. Clark writes as a diplomat and ethnographer, attentive to chiefs, gifts, populations, and trade geography. Ordway writes as a sergeant attentive to the men: who got wet, who got frostbitten, who needed whiskey. Gass, at least as published, gives the thinnest account and may here be unreliable as to date.
The convergence point is the ice itself. Clark notes it twice (The Ice begin to run
; The Ice began to run in the river 1/2 past 10 oClock P. M
) and Ordway opens with the boat being unloaded for fear the Ice would take it off.
The river was closing. The expedition’s mobile phase was over, and the long Mandan winter — of chimney-building, diplomacy, and journal-keeping itself — had begun.
